Thomasburg is a small hamlet in the Municipality of Tweed in eastern Ontario. Behind my home here is a fallow field, swamp, cedar bush, old apple orchard and woods. Almost every day I take the same walk through this territory to see who's been by, and try to figure out what they've been up to.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Hand spam?

This morning I found 4 comments on a post from June 2006 (Timing: A tale of two trees), apparently designed to entice readers to visit 4 different off-topic websites. Here's one of the comments:

Health is the functional and/or metabolic efficiency of an organism,at any moment in time, at both the cellular and global levels.All individual organisms, from the simplest to the most complex,vary between optimum health and zero health

I've taken them down.

I checked the my site stats to see if I could figure out where they came from and it looks like they probably came from India, and are the work of someone who found the archive page where the post lives through a search for "flower blogosphere." I checked the post to make sure the spam guard was still operational. It was. And the comments were posted a couple of minutes apart. So I can only conclude that this was done by hand. Meantime, I am getting increasing numbers of spam emails on email accounts that have until the last couple of weeks been relatively spam-free, suggesting that techniques for mining email addresses are becoming more sophisticated. A two-front spam attack seems to be going on--sneakier technology on one, more labour-intensive activities on the other. If people are willing to spam blogs by hand, the only way to deal with it will be to moderate comments by hand. Not terribly onerous at my moderate comment rate, but what a drag for higher profile blogs!

4 comments:

I've noticed a few spams such as you've described. I've also had more of what I refer to as "nuisance posts" where someone posts annoying or nonsensical comments on my blog. It seems to happen in fits and starts from time to time.

I shut down all comments on my blog posts because of blog comment spam. A recent post attracted 2 spam comments within a matter of minutes. I review all comments prior to publishing as this is the only way to get rid of the comments.